When my kids open packs they aren’t trying to figure out what is fun and what is not, they’re just having fun. My 7 year old just wants all the cute looking pokemon, which my 5 year old is happy to provide her because he wants the cool looking ones. My 3 year old just wants pikachu, so I have to literally plant pikachu cards into his packs if the set doesn’t have pikachu in it or he just walks away mad that he didn’t get a pikachu. Kids are experiencing pokemon from a kid’s perspective. And while the conceptual distribution of cards does affect that experience, I think they will find a way to make everything fun and awesome in their experience regardless of any of the details we adults get hung up on.
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Does anyone have any truly unpopular/controversial opinions? I want to see a comment that incites a riot immediately
Closest I’ve come is arguing Pokémon games are no longer RPGs.
Genuinely curious – I haven’t heard this before … but why?
The Wikipedia definition: “A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game; abbreviated RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting.”
Hidden Fates is shit, Shining Legends is worse. Evolutions is perhaps the worst.
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@c0ll3ct0r, with you on all of those
Try harder 
I will never understand people that spend hundreds trying to get alt arts of normal cards when their stats are no different.
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Vintage english cardstock is much much better than modern japanese because it is real. I want my cards to feel like thick pieces of cardboard made from actual paper, not some toxic plasticizer composite junk. The problems with qc and imperfections are well worth it.
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@c0ll3ct0r, still with you there
I’m still waiting for a comment that will make my blood pressure rise
- guitar is a stupid instrument, the worst mainstream instrument there is
- cards are not the best pokemon item, postcards are
Haha, I don’t think I can do it. Most of the good ones have been used already. If only opinions completely unrelated to Pokemon were allowed on here…we don’t want that dreaded “I think this thread has run its course”-comment, do we? 
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Nuclear bait.
Opinion: Kyogre looks like a Hitachi designed by Belle Delphine.
He asked for an opinion that would make their blood boil 
. As for the kyogre, are you sure that you werent around in ancient times to name the constellations? It looks nothing like a Hitachi right? If a Hitachi is an excavator, that is.
Hahahaha, not quite. More something that goes brrrrr and is NSFW.
I like Kyogre’s design actually, everyone seems to have a problem with the front part, my only problem is with the back half. It has that chopped-off look, like where is the back part?
These don’t even make me mad LOL
Idk about the stupidest, but I can see why someone might say that…
Pokemon postcards have amazing art – and they’re bigger (I still prefer cards, but totally get why someone might collect and appreciate postcards more)
LMFAO
i love this
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What’re some of the really good ones in this thread? I wasn’t here for the earlier pages and idk how I feel about scrolling through 300 pages of comments LOL
So if we go by the Wikipedia definition, almost every game is a roleplaying game. We are always assuming the role of a character in a fictional setting. Only games like Tetris and virtual chess don’t meet this description. Even Minesweeper has an implied location (a minefield) and an implied character (a minesweeper). What constitutes a proper RPG has been subject to debate for some time, though. “Is Zelda an RPG?” was a hallmark of the early internet and Metal Gear Solid famously includes a line of dialog where a character refers to the game itself as a “sort of roleplaying game.”
As RPG mechanics like skill trees and level ups made their way in to more and more games, the line between what constitutes an RPG blurred even more. Suddenly the traits people associated most strongly with RPGs, like the aforementioned skill and level progression, started to appear in all sorts of video games that were much more action-oriented. Tomb Raider 2013, for example, contained experience points and unlockable skills based on player level but nobody would really argue that Tomb Raider is an RPG.
Even so, not all RPGs are the same. The traits that define JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Persona are fundamentally different than the traits that define Western RPGs like Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Determining what these games all share is difficult, so when it comes to the world of RPGs and what makes a game a roleplaying game, what you really have to fall back on is what the intention of the game is. A game is an RPG when the developers want it to be. I will try to quantify this claim in a second.
When you look at a series as long-running as Pokémon, you see a series that has lived about as the genre itself has. When Pokémon originally came out, what qualified as an RPG was much clearer. The genre was much more strongly defined and led by much more standardized experiences. We can state definitively that early Pokémon games were RPGs and we can also state definitively that modern Pokémon games do not have a lot of the design concepts that the earlier games contained.
Let’s compare an event that occurs in Pokémon Gold & Silver to an event that occurs in Pokémon Sword & Shield.
In Gold & Silver, the player ventures to Olivine City. Along the way they encounter a Miltank Farm where they can acquire Moo Moo Milk and learn a little bit more about the agriculture of the Pokémon world. You arrive in Olivine City and discover Jasmine is not in her gym, but rather the lighthouse elsewhere in the city. It is not far away, but the player must explore the city in search of the lighthouse. They climb to the top and discover Jasmine is attending to a sick Ampharos. Ampharos keeps the lighthouse lit, so without Ampharos ships on the coast would be in danger. Further, Jasmine simply cannot think about battling while Ampharos is so unwell. We learn about the importance of the lighthouse from this as well as the gentle and compassionate nature of Jasmine.
Jasmine asks you to travel to Cianwood City to pick up a special medicine at a pharmacy there. You voyage across the ocean to this seaside town where you can trade for a rare Pokémon, discover another gym, and hear the locals gossip about the legendary Pokémon Lugia (foreshadowing a late game dungeon). But once you retrieve the medicine you return to Olivine and deliver the medication to Jasmine, who will now battle you.
In Sword & Shield, the player arrives in Hulbury, Nessa is standing outside the lighthouse - which is inaccessible. She hands you a trainer card and walks back to her gym. You fight her and leave through “Galar Mine No. 2”.
What we have here is a shift in what the priorities of Pokémon games are. Pokémon games used to be built around routes, dungeons, and questlines. There is a higher density of quest content in Cerulean City in RBY than there is in the entirety of Sword & Shield. You have the Team Rocket plot with the stolen Dig TM, you have the Nugget Bridge challenge and the reveal it is used for Team Rocket recruitment, you have Bill and his science experiments, you have an optional route to the Power Plant containing a legendary Pokémon, you have a preview of Cerulean Cave which you cannot yet enter, you get the SS Anne Ticket (foreshadowing your next dungeon), you can redeem your Bike Voucher.
The priority of the early Pokémon games was adventure and this reflects in the game design. The priorities of Sword & Shield is battling. All of Sword & Shield is in the service of battling and making battling faster to reach and easier to do. Complex routes are out, dungeons are out, side characters are out, town-based storylines are out. Even more superficial game design tropes like key items (Poké Flute, Silph Scope) and character skills (Cut, Strength, Flash) related to progression are out. All the game design of Sword & Shield is in service to battling and this is at the total eradication of everything that used to constitute an adventure.
This was not something that started in Sword & Shield. This also is not meant to signify a downward trend ever since the Game Boy Games. I think the real turn was at the beginning of the 3D era where the idea of what a Pokémon game is meant to provide started to change. The real wake up call for me was in Sun & Moon (a game I like) where you enter a cave at the base of a volcano and instantly appear at the top of the volcano from an exit. This was when it was clear that Pokémon games were not RPGs anymore because in any earlier Pokémon game that volcano would have been a complex dungeon route. Now it was a teleporter to more combat.
So if we look at all the design philosophies that have been abandoned over the course of the Pokémon brand, with the importance of storylines and quests and characters being reduced to almost nothing, we have to admit that the intentions behind making a Pokémon game have been drastically altered. All of the traits the games once had that firmly characterized the series as an RPG have been removed, so I do not feel that Game Freak wants their games to be perceived as RPGs. They want them to be perceived as battle simulators with an overworld. That’s what Sword & Shield are and it has been a slow decline to get here.
There are things I like about Sword & Shield. But as a lifelong Pokémon fan, the state of the brand breaks my heart. I do not think Pokémon games today are good for any of the reasons they used to be good. I feel like the series has lost so much of its material. Sword & Shield feels like a fraction of the experience I used to get playing Pokémon. But people don’t really seem to care - the series sells as well as ever and you never see people talking about this in any detail or depth.
The era of the mainline Pokémon RPG - at least for now - is over. We’ll see what Legends: Arceus achieves and how those lessons are incorporated in to Generation IX.
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@stagecoach, holy shit. What a write-up…
I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced, but you have some pretty compelling points there. Your defintion of RPG hinges on the landscape of games available to us in the modern day, right? Would you consider Pokemon to be an RPG if you were in 1998?
Pokémon isn’t just made for kids anymore.
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